


Philtering

by filia_noctis



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:38:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8878051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/pseuds/filia_noctis
Summary: "Our lady of the upside-down"





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Brigdh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brigdh/gifts).



At her mother’s hearth, with the dawning of the first mists of autumn, Persephone starts pulling out the pots and pans and wooden crates and sacks and rusty, swollen tin cans shelved away neatly, a trifle resentfully, in her name. To her mother’s ever deepening scowl, she bakes cornmeal with a hint of rosemary. For remembrance, she is tempted to joke, feigning an accent, but never does. She will put aside most of her batch of loaves for her mother’s bread tin--partings develop their own rituals of gifts, of call and responses, of lost recipes, favoured dishes, mutual scoffing at the inevitable making-do with less and less, and strange and stranger, wider rims of ingredients, till her mother half snarls and says, “That ain’t no soul food, hon. Thass garbage, that is,” even while she puts away tin foils and old, granular tupperware like secreted away hoards of treasure full of the last scraps of her daughter’s love she gets to savour for the rest of the year. Like they don’t pet each other on day one of spring, increasingly less discreetly, every passing year, to fumble and hunt for bones sticking out, or a spleen (or P’s belly) bloating up with the nothing that eats into the eyes and bites into the flesh of every face they’ve been seeing for years now. Like Hades’ impossible hoards do not relieve Demeter even a teeny tiny bit about her daughter during the harder, darker, impossibly leaner winters. Like his bountiful generosities sent along with P aren’t getting increasingly carefully measured out instead of the careless arrogance Demeter feigns, to feed a yawning hunger that might swallow them all.  Demeter grits her teeth and watches her daughter dance around the kitchen--hauling and mauling and chopping and grinding--and is soon too absorbed in the cups and canisters to remember to scowl.

P, in the last days of scrubbed face and pigtails and ungainly, old frilly aprons over faded summer skirts, grins back, all teeth.

She always begins with the bread, some hash and the chitlings. She goes through the bits of okra and sorghum, working her way through the old tins of cayenne peppers and the occasional nutmeg (she is a bit too generous with the turmeric sometimes, and gets swatted by her Momma when the smell escapes the hardy, battered lids). Occasionally, she will complain of the boredom and rancid staleness of the abundance of tins that line up her husband’s larder: how much can you say about acidic peas and prunes soaked in what feels like trash vinegar, and meat that is too rubbery to warm to a skillet, really?

Slowly though, the battered tupperware and casserole dishes give way to the oak barrels, tin drums and canisters P stocks up in the cellars on day one along with the corn, barley and rye. Demeter doesn’t lack in wheat. Yet. The old copper is sometimes danced on and sometimes pounded like a thug on a limb. Demeter watches her daughter’s smile change slowly, surely, even as the oven is abandoned entirely in favour of the still. She watches her daughter mix things she was taught, but taught differently, separately. Watches her carefully skimming and putting away the first cupfuls from the drip, checking the flames as she lights some in a tin mug: blue is good, yellow is bad news, and red, disaster and a whole lot of rework with things that are now gone and thrown away. (It’s never not blue. P has been taught well.) She could criticise them as much as she did the pickled gourds and onion jam a week back, but words dry in her throat as she watches her daughter with a dripper and a measuring cup. Slowly, the old skirts with dandelion and sunflower prints disappear. The frilly apron is abandoned in favour of smeary overalls. The pigtails stop somewhere mid-week when P’s cornrows need to be put up because of the distracting heat. The hands begin to reach out as surely for nightshade and aconite as they did for pepper and thyme the previous week. (This is a part of distillery nobody has taught P, and nobody claims credit for.) Demeter used to raise an  eyebrow at those, not without a flutter in her belly, but her girl just laughed and said the bit of the hooch she mixes with stuff gets called names like Sky in a Jar back there. Demeter wasn’t braced for a flowery tongue that is not P herself, especially there, so she listens with surprise more at the names than the moonshine itself. Her Miz P knows her way around a kitchen alright. Her marriage bed looks like it did done the rest. Now her hooch is the talk of that town, Demeter knows even as she watches in wonder, and pride even now, this late in the day, as her daughter switches out from tin trays of buttermilk biscuits to white lightning, mountain dew, hooch, white whiskey, homebrew poured out neatly in recycled bottles cleaned out carefully in sudsy water to get rid of stench worse than wet newsprint and dog’s pee. 

When the old box of P’s specials comes out, Demeter knows the time’s up, about and gone, and doesn’t so much as frown at her daughter straining out and mixing her homebrews from the medicine box to give an edge--her “specials” P calls them--as she quietly recites--for her benefit or her Momma’s, hard to tell--about arnica that helps with the achin’ joints, some of those poor kids hurtling themselves all day at the Wall, Momma, just a teeny bit of bloody brown relief with their hooch. Makes it quicker too. Variations of the darker, grey-black nightshade to make ’em relax. The belladonna soothing the part of their hind brains that no amount of hooch can stop from screaming. And often, too often, the bottle of bluish-black aconite tipped carefully to get them high faster, the taste strange on their tongues even with the familiar sting, the liquid fire that caresses their thoughts, then swallows them clean and whole and fast, spitting nothing out, till they can remember naught but the amber in the bottles, the opals glinting around her throat like so many pomegranate pips squirted out over the scarlet silk, the smell of sun in her brown, brown skin as she watches over their glasses and souls while they fill and tip over with her brew, her rich chuckle crisp like the red-brown earth they never get to bury their fingers in no more (“brain-addled”, some of the servers whisper), even as she directs with a finger and a nod, who should be poured out what, and how, and how much; till all that they clutch to remember is wiped away in greasy mopwater and all their mind is is a block of chalky slate all dusted and smooth. She likes to call it, only in the lizard brain that lives in the space between her collar bones and her skull, peace. Even as. Even as the night is. Becomes was. Becomes then. And she sails into the debris of the dawn in her husband’s arms. 

The bottles find cartons and packings of cleaned hay. The cartons and bottles even find labels of cheap paper stuck with homemade starch glue and runny ink, with a single scarlet pomegranate pip looking like a droplet of good old blood squeezed out of capillaries on fingertips. By the end of the fortnight, her mother’s pantry is stocked to the brims, as is her husband’s cellar.

Two days before P walks in the kitchen packed and ready--her lipstick immaculate, her heels clicking--a truck gurgles its way in her Momma’s backyard, piling into its gullet cartons full of Lady Lethe’s Finest--an inside joke, Demeter wonders if it makes Hades smirk: stuff that’ll make the winter pass, like the rest of the year, soon stuttering its way back to Hadestown, only a little (a very little) ahead of her.


End file.
